The felled trees were short, moderately thin, bound up by tightly knotted ropes, and were being dragged along via a thick hemp cord through the thick jungle by two straining and sweating men.

"Ahhh," Trevor grunted as he drew a harried breath into his lungs in a shallow manner; the man's sweet streamed forth from his brow and hair profusely, over his eyes and into his mouth almost the moment that it opened.

Randal, the stronger and the more experienced of the two led the pair of men at the front of the rope, leaving Trevor to strain closest to the bound and tied lumber pile. Somehow, Randal managed to avoid every obstacle, every single bush, tree, and drop-off, and to lead and guide Trevor -- and the logs that the men dragged together through the dense rainforest -- into doing the same.

The carpenter's great skill at directing his and Trevor's haul aside, the constant turns -- while entirely necessary if the pair didn't want the logs that they dragged to become stuck on one thing or another -- over time caused the rope that he and Randal heaved to cut away and knick off pieces of Trevor's palms' flesh.

"We're about twenty chimes out, Trevor," Randal declared and shouted back to the other man. "The jungle gets thinner the closer we get to your parcel -- at least to where you have your tent pitched on it anyway."

"Twenty chimes, is that all?" Trevor said back with a confidence that was very clearly a struggle to muster, but one that the young man mustered nonetheless.

Randal smiled at his companion's refusal to complain; the carpenter couldn't help but tug a bit harder, and to strain his powerful shoulders and deltoids, himself after hearing Trevor's declaration of a refusal to admit any weariness.

"Aye, that's all," Randal said back in a tone that denoted he was in good spirits, his deep baritone voice ringing as he spoke. "Keep tugging and we'll be done with hauling these before you even feel it in your back."

Trevor's feet, and the man himself, rejoiced at the sight of his tent coming into view through the trees of the jungle. The skin on the padding of the man's feet had become irritated and red from the morning's work; with every beat of his heart the flesh of his feet throbbed and stung with a half-numb and half-burning kind of sensation.

Randal led Trevor and the logs a little ways more through the rainforest, until the pair's haul of timber slipped from the dirt of the underbrush and slushed into the Sykan sand of the settlement's ocean line. It was then, on the sediment of the beach, that Randal finally ceased his tugging on the large rope that he and trevor had used to haul their wood through Falyndar's thick shrubbery.

Trevor heaved in a deep and freeing breath as the labor intensive dragging came to an end. The man released the rope that he'd been holding onto for the past hour; as he let go of the rope, his arteries released a torrent of blood into his tender and worn palms. Truly the young man's hands were doing little better than his feet when it came to how they were holding up to all the day's work. Trevor couldn't but suspect that his body would likely grow rougher and strong the longer that he lived with the Sykans -- something he was sure that he wouldn't mind at the end of the toughening of his body, but that surely hurt and battered his undeveloped muscles and soft skin during said toughening.

Randal stretched his back and allowed his backpack to slip from his shoulders and fall into the sand.

"Well Trevor, we made it," Randal said. "We should be able to get the frame of your home lashed out before night fall. After that, I'll show you how to make the walls of it and you'll be able to finish that yourself."

"You'll have a tried and true house soon enough," Randal commented, as he lowered himself down to dig in his backpack.

"Would you mind undoing the knots on the timber, while I get out a could of hand saws?" the carpenter inquired of Trevor.

"No it's not a problem," Trevor said, as he glanced back to the wood pile and wandered towards it to undo the double fisherman and the timber hitch knots that Randal had earlier showed him how to tie onto the trees.

Trevor's sore and somewhat skint up hands slipped across and undid the knots of the ropes that held the lumber pile together. First, he untied the timer hitch; being the knot that had allowed he and Randal to drag the timber, but not being the one that held the pile together, the logs were relatively unaffected when Trevor loosed the utilitarian knot.

Moving on from the front of the pile and the undone timber hitch, Trevor approached the middle of the fastened together and somewhat-thin trees. The knot that held the pile together was a double fisherman's -- a mostly simple knot that was actually two knots that were tied with a single rope, with each knot on the rope serving to pull against and provide tension and strength to the other. Each of the knots of the double fisherman required Trevor's separate attention in unfastening; the knot that he had to untie first was, of course, the last knot that he'd tied -- this gave the inexperienced young man a bit of trouble at first, but after a few moments of fiddling with the wrong knot he caught on to his beginner's mistake and was soon well along into undoing both of the double fisherman's knots.

The lumber pile came apart with a series of rustling and rolling thuds. The ten or so trees within the pile were all somewhat tall, but still relatively light and thin when compared to most of Falyndar's massive and gigantic flora; thus, being as lacking in weight as they were, the individual pieces of lumber bounced, fell apart from one another, and flexed a bit as the rope that had been holding them tightly for some time finally released its tension.

"What do you want to do with the rope?" Trevor asked Randal, as the trees of the lumber pile settled onto the sand of the beach and on top of each other.

The carpenter that the young man spoke to had finished ruffling through his backpack, which he had left sitting in the sand, and had unrolled a large, leather bundle of tools over the ground in front of himself. As his companion spoke to him, Randal withdrew two small, handheld, and portable saws from atop the unfurled tool-kit.

"We can just leave it for now," Randal said, as he rose to his feet, leaving his tool kit on the sand where he'd unrolled it. "We can roll them up once we get through with the wood that they're sitting under."

The carpenter and wildsman approached Trevor and offered him on of the saws. The young man took the older man's tool readily enough; Randal had already introduced him to an axe earlier in the day and now it seemed that he would be learning the working of another tool's proper usage. Trevor could see the value and use in pratical skills -- a value that he was coming to respect more and more for each day that he lived in the small and undeveloped settlement of Syka -- and thus he didn't mind receiving Randal's expert tutelage.

"Thank you," Trevor replied in response to taking the borrowed saw.

Randal reached for one of the felled trees of the timber pile that Trevor has recently unbound. Seeing the carpenter grasping for one of the trees, Trevor grabbed the log along with the man, helping him to hoist and to carry the wood a few feet away. Together the two men hefted up and sat the tree that Randal had selected onto the sand, a noticeable distance away from the pile that it had been sitting atop.

Randal went down to his knees before the tree that the two had dragged away from the lumber pile. With the hand that was not carrying his handsaw, the man reached into his pocket. After a momentary pause, the carpenter withdrew a thin, but still sturdy -- and quite long -- looking rolled strip of cloth.

Trevor dropped down to one knee on the opposite side of the cut tree over from the carpenter, giving Randal ample space to demonstrate and apply whatever skills he was preparing to use.

"We've got the wood to the lot that it needs to be on," Randal commented. "Are you ready to learn what goes into building a hut?"

"Ready enough I suppose," Trevor laughed a bit and paused, before continuing to speak. "I don't think it could hurt any more than hauling that wood through the hot jungle, though."

Randal smiled a bit. "You seemed confident before."

Trevor shrugged. "In the moment. But I'd think I'd like to learn this."

"It's not too hard once you understand it. Carpentry is just assembling pieces. The difficult part is knowing what those pieces are -- and where they need to go -- before you make them out of the wood. That takes some learning to do well," Randal revealed.

Randal flicked his wrist and unfurled the deceptively long piece of cloth that he'd withdrawn from his pocket. The strip of fabric was lengthy and it was a light tan shade in color; the most interesting facet of the cloth roll was no doubt the fact that at various distances along its length it was marked with black ink and scribbled numbers that increased, or decreased, as one's eyes traveled either forward or backwards across its face.

"But to make those pieces you need to make sure that you always measure anything you cut," Randal said. "Measure more than once, because you can -- all it costs you to be sure of a cut is time and patience. Whereas the cut itself can cost you an entire useful log or tree if you don't get the dimensions and measurements of how you're cutting it right."

Randal rose up to one knee and half crouch-walked and half stretched to lay one end of his marked cloth to the left-hand end of the tree before him. The man then dragged the rest of the cloth to the other side of the tree, stretching the whole fabric strip along the length of the timber. Finally, the carpenter devoted a final set of careful moments towards situating the strip of fabric and making sure that it lined up perfectly straight with the tree that it had been rolled out beside.

"This is a measuring cloth," Randal said, as most of his attention remained directed towards aligning said cloth with the individual tree that he'd chosen to work with.

Trevor noticed that Randal had aligned one end of the cloth strip that he spoke of up perfectly with the left-hand tip of the fallen tree in front of himself. The entirety of the length of the measuring cloth, however, was a little too great and extended past the right-hand tip of the same timber.

Randal looked up to Trevor and pointed to the far end of measuring cloth that ran off past the right-hand end of the tree.

"If you'll tell me the number there on the cloth at the end of the tree, I'll explain to you what it means and how we're going to use it," Randal offered to Trevor.

Trevor half-rose and took a shallow step towards the right, in the direction that the expert builder had pointed out. He moved just enough to allow his eyes to trace and identify the deeply-scratched, quill-written number on the measuring cloth that Randal had asked to know. In the common tongue, the measuring cloth had the symbols for a one and four etched onto its face in a purposefully bold and utilitarian font. The young man could ascertain by looking at the number that it had been written with ease of reading and simplistic clarity in mind -- something that made sense to him, considering its apparent use as a craftsman's tool.

"It's a fourteen," Trevor said, before glancing back to Randal and then falling back down to one knee and taking a guess at the purpose of the number on the cloth. "It's a measurement isn't it?"

"Fourteen feet, then," Randal confirmed Trevor's assumption with his words. "We're going to have to cut this one straight in half. We'll need at least eight, seven-foot poles to frame out the sides of your house. You don't really need the framing poles to be much taller than yourself for a basic and decently comfortable shelter. The roof is where we'll get most of the height of your hut."

Randal marked the six-foot point of the tree with a pass or two of his handsaw.

"There should be another measuring cloth the tool roll. If you're willing enough, you can cut a few of the trees to measure. Remember, seven feet and we only need eight, so we'll need to keep up with each other's number of poles," Randal said. "Also try and pick trees that are about as thick as this one. Towards the top of the trees you'll have to remove the branches with your saw; cut flush to the tree's length and just keep the branches in a pile -- we'll need them later on."

NotesGreat thread! I haven't read the precursors, so I'm not entirely sure what's being acomplished here, but you've got good pacing and design. And Trevor is a funny, relatable character in the way he struggles to keep up with the more skilled NPC's. Hopefully the grade helps him get the experience he needs!

Now for some constructive critisism! Since I'm the farthest thing from a professional writer take everything I say with a grain of salt, but this is what I've noticed.

You've got some redundancies sprinkled through your writing, and they look like this-

Once you write something down you should do what I do and wade back in with a pair of pruning shears to snip these redundancies and make your sentences less wordy. And avoid words like 'somewhat' and 'relatively' as qualifiers, as that can be a sign you're being both wordy and unclear. You want to be tight and neat and confident as the writer, and let the character flouder around in uncertainty.